China's public is far more trusting of artificial intelligence than their peers in the United States and other Western countries, a survey has found. In China, 87 percent of people said they trusted AI, compared with 67 percent in Brazil, 32 percent in the US, 36 percent in the United Kingdom, and 39 percent in Germany, the Edelman poll released on Tuesday showed. Only one-third of Americans said they expected AI to reduce poverty and polarisation, though half predicted a positive impact on climate-related challenges. While 54 percent of Chinese said they embraced greater use of AI, just 17 percent of Americans answered the same, according to the survey. Trust was highest among young people, though still much lower in Western countries.

As Brian Chesky tells it, the reinvention of Airbnb started with the coup at OpenAI. On November 17, 2023, the board of OpenAI fired company CEO Sam Altman. His friend Chesky leapt into action--publicly defending his pal on X, getting on the phone with Microsoft's CEO, and throwing himself into the thick of Altman's battle to retake OpenAI. Five days later Altman prevailed, and Chesky--"I was so jacked up," he says--turned his buzzing mind to his own company, Airbnb. The Chesky extended family had already held their turkey get-together a week earlier, and the Airbnb CEO had no holiday plan.

Big changes could be coming to Airbnb next year. In a conversation at WIRED's Big Interview even in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company's cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky told global editorial director Katie Drummond that he hopes that, in 2025, "people say'that was one of the biggest reinventions of a company in recent memory.'" Though Chesky kept details scant, he did say that the company hopes to reimagine its Experiences section, which he says consumers really like but that he doesn't think has caught on as much as it could. The move seems to be an extension of Chesky's belief in the value of physical experiences and physical community, which he still thinks trump most digital experiences, even in the age of AI. In an effort to prove that, even two years into the AI revolution, fundamentally very little has been changed for most people, Chesky challenged the room to look at the apps on their phone home screens and think how much any of them have been substantially changed by generative AI.

Want to Get Into Founder Mode? Paul Graham's viral essay explains why Brian Chesky and Steve Jobs ruled and professional managers stink. But if a manager is smart and the founder is meh, who's better? Fledgling founders entering a three-month residency at Y Combinator often start their term with a bang: Brian Chesky, the cofounder and CEO of Airbnb, fires off an inspirational speech. His company, of course, started with three nobodies going through the program. This year, Chesky topped himself.

Airbnb wants to mold its hosts into a powerful organizing force, akin to a union, to advocate on its behalf with local governments around the world and to serve as an ideological rebuke to the advances of AI at other tech firms. As part of that effort to increase engagement with hosts, CEO Brian Chesky announced today that he is embarking on a world tour, forming a host advisory board that will provide feedback to the company and sit in on one of its four annual board meetings, and do monthly check-ins with Airbnb users via Facebook Live. "I want to be held accountable to the community," Chesky, who is modifying his title to CEO and head of community, told a group of hosts gathered at Airbnb HQ. "It's incredibly important because when we sit in a room trying to make decisions, we want to make sure we're doing it for the community, not to the community." Chesky will visit London, New York, Cape Town, Delhi, and Beijing to meet with hosts over the next couple of weeks, and hinted that more changes are coming to improve customer service and host experience. Putting hosts front and center is part of Airbnb's business strategy -- after all, the company relies on people to list their homes for rent -- but it also hints at Airbnb's transition into political advocacy.